|ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AMD-890FX Motherboard|
|Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards|
|Written by David Ramsey|
|Wednesday, 26 May 2010|
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EVEREST Benchmark Results
Lavalys EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.
All of the benchmarks used in our test bed (Queen, Photoworxx, ZLib, and AES) rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very little system memory while also being aware of HyperThreading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. While the EVEREST CPU tests really only compare the processor performance more than it measures platforms, it still offers a glimpse into what kind of power each platform possesses.
Queen and Photoworxx tests are synthetic benchmarks that operate the function many times over and over-exaggerate by several magnitudes what the real-world performance would be like. The Queen benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and misprediction penalties of the CPU. It does this by finding possible solutions to the classic queen problem on a chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. At stock clock speeds the Crosshair IV motherboard has a barely-discernible performance edge (a fraction of a percent in Queen, and 8-9% in PhotoWorxx) over its older sibling, possibly due to the doubled link speed between the 890FX and SB850 south bridge. The overclocked results are similarly close at 3% and 11%.
The Zip library and AES test results are similar to the previous tests. The performance of the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula motherboard is identical to the 790FX-based board at stock clock speeds (less than 1% difference), and about 3% faster when overclocked. Now, let's look at some PCMark Vantage tests...